


Looking Glass

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Gen, re-embodiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4526400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Re-embodied in Valinor, Elenwë struggles to accept her new body and a life that doesn't quite seem to fit anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Glass

It had been weeks since her re-embodiment now, Elenwë thought; surely that meant that the strangeness of it all should have worn off. 

Apparently, it had not. 

She realised that she had been sitting staring into her mirror for quite some time now, her hands poised midway through brushing her hair - still holding her hairbrush - trying to find a hint of familiarity in the features that stared back at her from the mirror. 

Something, anything, to show that it was all real. That it had all really happened. 

Elenwë sighed, laying down the beautiful jewel-inlaid hairbrush on the dressing table. She looked into her own face once more. She saw her own features, as they had always been. 

And yet, they were different. 

She took in her almond-shaped eyes, golden-brown skin and her honeyed fall of loosely curling hair. (When she had awoken in Lórien, her hair was longer than it had been upon the Ice, she had been quick to realise. The Valar must have made that choice for her. She had almost taken scissors to it just to regain some small control, and probably would have if she had not thought it would upset her mother.) 

She looked the same, at least perhaps through the eyes of a stranger.

And yet before, she had had chapped lips, wind-burned cheeks, and perpetually reddened eyes. She touched the ball of her thumb, unconsciously feeling for the place where the scar had been, the one from where she had cut herself on the skinning knife, early on in the journey. That cut had been deeper than it looked; it had bled all night and she had had to hide it from Itarillë, for she did not want her daughter frightened. It had taken a long time to heal too, and Lalwendë had said with a grave face that that was because of the shortage of food, weakening them all. 

The scar, of course, was no longer there, the skin smooth and unmarked.

Nor were any of the other marks that showed any sign of what had happened, the imprints that the journey had left on her body, on all their bodies. 

The stretch marks that remained after her pregnancy long ago were gone too, her body smooth and new and unmarked. When she had seen that she had thought she had lost her memory, or that she was going mad, and then she had realised and cried all night, silently. 

Would she truly be left with only memories, that seemed to fade by the day into unreality?

Her wedding ring was gone too, needless to say, and the finger where she had worn it felt bare and strange. 

(Not that she had been wearing it, at the end. It was too cold for that on the Ice, fingers too likely to swell, skin to freeze to cold metal, even with gloves. Instead she and Turukáno had kept their rings in inside pockets, each close to their hearts.)

She realised she was staring at her own face again. She gritted her teeth and went back to needlessly brushing her hair. Needlessly, she thought, for there was no wind in this stifling room in her parents’ house.

She had returned to Taniquetil, to her parents’ home, immediately after her return, for she could not quite bring herself to face the court of Arafinwë. Not yet, anyway. 

The bell beside the door clanged, startling her. Sighing, Elenwë buttoned up her high collar and finished doing up her sleeves. She was late, she knew, for Amarië was to come to visit her this morning. Elenwë had been glad, at first, to see her childhood friend, but she had soon found a certain tension that ran between them in lines, a strangeness not unlike that she felt when looking into her own features. 

She knew what it was now. Amarië, though Elenwë cared for her, was of her past. A different world, in which no cracks opened before her feet, sucking her down into the darkness, no freezing water crushing the life from her. No brilliant lights overhead, arcing in unearthly colours of terrible beauty. No choices between living and dying, no bodies left behind in the snow. No tears freezing upon her face, stinging in the wind. 

Instead there was the sound of distant singing in the chapel across the courtyard and the light of the strange new lamps in the sky pouring benignly in through the gap in the shutters. There was peppermint tea and high collared festival robes, the harp she had not played in years, and her mother’s tabby cat dozing in the corner. And there was Amarië. 

Elenwë had thought, or hoped, when Amarië had first pulled her into her arms in a wordless hug, tears of joy in both their eyes, that Amarië might understand. 

Of course, Elenwë knew better now. Much as she loved Amarië, no one who had not set out on that journey, who had never died and returned, would ever understand.

She wondered, sometimes, whether this all existed at all, or if it did whether it was truly the same world as that other one. The one where her daughter and husband were, even now, their whole family. Her family, truly. 

 _Why?_  she often wondered.  _I have a daughter; Itarillë needs her mother. Turukáno needs me too. He has Irissë, and she will try to help him and be strong, but they all need me there. There was still so much for me to be, and to do._  Her thoughts twisted through the same desperate, tangled paths they had taken countless times since she had woken, weak-limbed and over-sensitised, in the garden that seemed garishly bright, overwhelming. 

 _What did I do?_ She asked within her own head.  _Why did the Valar choose me for this? Why snap my life off like a twig and begin it again, right where I started?_

_Is this my punishment for breaking from the Vanyar?_

She had always been taught that the Valar were boundlessly kind. _But,_  Elenwë thought _, if this is kindness, then it is of a sort completely outside the experience of the Children._

_Perhaps the shining ones have a different definition of kindness?_

_This feels more like cruelty, this strangeness, this distance._

Truly, she only wanted to hold her daughter in her arms. 

Instead she clenched her fists, willing the tears from her eyes. Then she stood up, pulling on her cloak.

Amarië was, after all, waiting for her. 


End file.
